These Stickers Make Any Gloves Smartphone-Friendly

When the smartphone revolution created a particularly wintry problem—having to remove your gloves on cold days to use your phone—the world responded by inventing those gloves with fingertips that work on a touchscreen. Taps, a new idea currently being funded on Kickstarter, is doing one better. These are stickers you add to normal gloves that will make them touchscreen-capable.

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The key to Taps is electric conductivity. When you touch a smartphone's screen, Taps creator Tony Yu tells Popular Mechanics, the phone has a layer that conducts the natural electricity from your hand and plots it out on an X and Y axis. Taps replicates that conductivity by using pieces of conductive carbon 100 nanometers big and blending it with a polyurethane material. Yu says his stickers will "trick your phone into thinking it is being touched with by a hand."

Yu's company, Nanotips, has been at the game of glove-improvement for a few years now. Their initial product, which the company is named after, is a liquid—almost a paint that you can apply to gloves to make them work with smartphones. The Taps stickers were the next logical step.

A challenge arose when Yu and his co-workers realized that many phones these days come with biometric finger scan technology. The carbon could fake being a finger, but it couldn't replicate your fingerprint. But each set of Taps can gain access to a biometric scanner. "It doesn't look like a fingerprint," Yu says, but each sticker comes with tiny dots rolled into the material that a scanner will recognize as unique.

With a promise to ship by Christmas, the Taps could make a good present for someone who already has a set of perfectly fine gloves.

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